I fucked up. However good my intentions were, I harmed others and I have to own that. Though I have no right to ask, I nevertheless beg your forgiveness for these five horses I put through college to catastrophic results.
When Walnut Symphony galloped up to me with that acceptance letter to Vassar stuck to his forehead, covering his tuition was a no-brainer. “History major?” I asked encouragingly, and he flapped an ear in his little way that meant yes. At first, things were good. Walnut Symphony charmed his professors by regularly rearing up to neigh during seminars, and aced his exams once we learned to rub the paper with wolf piss so he wouldn’t eat it. I remember thinking, “This horse is gonna be valedictorian if he doesn’t get spooked into traffic by construction noise.”
Unfortunately, the big thing I forgot about history is how fucked up it is for horses. The more Walnut Symphony learned about horses getting spurred and flogged and gibbed by artillery shells, the angrier he grew around people. He bolted out of card nights with his roommates, he quit the a cappella group he had rhythmically stomped his hooves in. One evening, his rage finally boiled over. He kicked down the doors of Vassar’s library and methodically took a shit inside every single volume of their rare books collection. Now those priceless books are ruined and Walnut Symphony’s doing 15 years in the big house, all because my dumb ass went and put him through college. Vassar’s lawyers told me I’m in the clear for this legally but they would still consider my suicide “a sort of personal courtesy.”
Mississippi Bean Storm looked so sharp in the special horse lab coat I sewed for her that I never thought twice about paying for her to study biochemistry at Colby. Her nostrils were the exact right size to hold a test tube, and her intrinsic understanding of experimental design mostly offset the challenges presented by her constantly trying to eat microscope slides. It felt big. The issue here was that while her custom lab coat fit great, her regular safety goggles kept poking her big wide-set horse eyeballs. One day in the lab Mississippi Bean Storm put a hoof clean through her professor’s skull because abrupt, stomach-churning violence is admittedly always on the table anytime a horse feels weird. Colby ended up mulching her into dog food as part of their settlement with the guy’s family, and when I told my therapist how bad I felt for my role he just hissed at me like a cat for the rest of my hour.
In hindsight, MIT was always a powder keg waiting for a suave horse like Norwegian Mambo to set it off. Those reedy little STEM nerds had never seen equine confidence like his, so to them, studying alongside a horse so cool and self-assured was basically like encountering God. Math dorks wanted him. Engineering dorks wanted to be him. A couple thousand of the world’s most promising nerds loped through snow on all fours trying to imitate the unbothered canter of my preternaturally sexy horse. Students swore off dining hall food to eat hay. Salt licks were ubiquitous. Unsurprisingly, Norwegian Mambo fever caused widespread malnutrition and injury—MIT basically became Jurassic Park for afflictions otherwise eradicated since 1800. Around 40 kids died and the others will never work again, just an incalculable blow to humanity’s nerd pool. Cures for cancer, new energy sources, all gone up in smoke thanks to my misguided charity. Norwegian Mambo went into finance after graduating so it’s not even like all this suffering was worth anything. He’s just another scumfuck VC horse now.
You probably saw on the news about that horse who hacked 120 million social security numbers to trade for carrots on the dark web. You probably thought, “What fucking idiot went $240,000 out of his way to have NYU teach that horse computer science, plus built the horse a giant keyboard it could operate with its big ungainly hooves?” Well, it turns out a fucking idiot like me does that. I’m the fucking idiot who rigged her stable up with ethernet. I’m the fucking idiot who proudly gave the horse a sugar cube everytime she bypassed a firewall without considering the broader consequences of linking data breaches with food rewards. I’m the fucking idiot so blind to my horse’s capacity for cybercrime that when the cops finally showed up and Daffodil galloped off in a panic, I still assumed her fear was just because the shiny stripes on their pants sort of looked like snakes. She ultimately pled down to supervised release in exchange for neighing against some Belarusian identity thieves in court, but their victims are still fucked. I stopped going to church after this because any God worth worshiping would have killed me three horses ago.
I truly believed Dustin Hoofman’s archaeology degree would turn things around for me. He was a pro at gently brushing away sediment with his tail, and something about attending Yale made him way chiller about historic injustice against horses than Walnut Symphony had been. He was the first horse Bonesman and graduated summa cum laude, even making it through most of the ceremony without his ridiculous horse penis bobbing down beneath his robes. I was so proud. Finally, my losing streak of putting horses through college was at an end—or so I thought.
Anyway, on his first expedition to Egypt (horses love Egyptology), Dustin Hoofman manages to unearth a totally undisturbed Middle Kingdom necropolis. Real find-of-the-century shit, just sprawling chambers of funerary goods and sarcophagi and even a whole-ass solar barge. His team is just finishing up the initial survey when somebody sneezes. Dustin Hoofman fucking bolts because a common reaction of horses to unexpected stimuli is to run very fast like an idiot. By the time they calm him down he’s busted up pretty much everything in the tomb. About the only things his rampage didn’t ruin were the hieroglyphics, which, upon later translation, reveal that the whole place was rigged up like the Home Alone house with curses. “Defilers’ bones will grow brittle, defilers will get many scorpions up in their shit, etc.” In particular, one curse threatened to unleash a great pestilence upon the earth, which I mention because this all went down in October of 2019. Dustin Hoofman got cut in half by an elevator that January before the pandemic really popped off (probably not curse-related honestly, I think horses just don’t understand elevators), but I witnessed the full, terrible consequence of my having put a horse through college. And what scares me more than anything is this: I’m sure I’ll do it again.
